How to beat Pep: A comprehensive breakdown on how three sides found a way past Guardiola

Manchester City are going for 10 consecutive wins against Swansea at the weekend

The man to stop - Guardiola remains unbeaten with City this season (Getty)

Pep Guardiola lost his first league game as a manager, 1-0 to Numancia. It did not become a habit. In his next 256 league games, Guardiola has lost a mere 19 times – and five of those defeats came after the Barcelona or Bayern Munich sides he managed had won the championship. As Manchester City go for their 10th straight win at Swansea, the question the Premier League will be asking is: how do you beat Pep? Tim Rich looks at three teams that did.

BARCELONA 0-2 HERCULES: September 2010: Tactic? Suffocating the full-backs

Despite their name, Hercules were a little, newly-promoted club from Alicante who were facing a Barcelona side that had not lost at home for 16 months – and that was when they had already won La Liga. It was also Catalonia’s National Day. Logically, they had no chance.

However, having spent 10 years as a player at the Nou Camp and several seasons coaching Barcelona C, Hercules’ manager, Esteban Vigo, had a pretty fair idea of how Guardiola would play. He also invited ridicule by telling his players they would win 2-0.

One of Guardiola’s signature moves is to push his full-backs up to flood the midfield. Vigo countered that by employing a diamond formation and ordering Royston Drenthe and one of his other midfielders to crowd the Barcelona full-backs whenever they had the ball.

It meant the other Barca full-back would be unmarked but the unusually poor state of the Nou Camp pitch and Vigo’s instructions to man-mark Andres Iniesta meant Barcelona could not switch flanks with their usual speed.


 Pep Guardiola at Barcelona 
 (Getty)

Vigo acknowledged he got the idea from watching Jose Mourinho’s Internazionale side beat Barcelona in the Champions League semi-finals a few months before. Curiously, when Mourinho attempted to replicate precisely those tactics in the Manchester derby, they came horribly unstuck as neither Jesse Lingard nor Henrikh Mkhitaryan were able to contain City’s full-backs in the way Drenthe did for Hercules.

Guardiola had rested a host of players – but not Lionel Messi - as Barcelona were opening their Champions League campaign against Panathinaikos in midweek. There was perhaps a lack of focus and reports talked of Barcelona ‘playing on autopilot’.

Reaching the interval a goal down from a set piece, Guardiola brought on Xavi and after an hour introduced Danny Alves at left back. Vigo countered by removing Drenthe, who was by then exhausted, for Sendoa Agirre, who at the age of 34 and in his first game at the Nou Camp, continued to push Alves back.

The defeat emphasised another of Guardiola’s problems – the absence of a Plan B. The breakdown of his relationship with Zlatan Ibrahimovic meant he no longer possessed a target man and in the final, desperate minutes that job fell to a centre-half, Gerard Pique.

When Bobby Robson ran the Nou Camp, Guardiola had been part of a Barcelona side whose defeats, home and away to Hercules had cost them the title. This time it did not. Hercules were relegated and, two months before, Esteban Vigo was sacked.

WOLFSBURG 4 BAYERN MUNICH 1: January 2015: Tactic? Fast counter-attacks

This was the first meaningful defeat Pep Guardiola suffered in the Bundesliga – and he had been manager of Bayern Munich for 18 months. In his first season at the Allianz, Bayern had only lost when they had already won the title.

This was Bayern’s first game back after the Bundesliga’s winter break and they were caught very cold by a Wolfsburg side that exploited the great weakness of Guardiola’s game plan – its vulnerability to fast counter-attacks. However, for those Premier League managers wanting to exploit that, the man who destroyed Bayern Munich in the Volkswagen Arena now plays for Manchester City.

Kevin de Bruyne was already well on his way to becoming the Bundesliga’s player of the year. This display would have persuaded Manchester City he was worth £54m. On this Friday night, De Bruyne was especially motivated. It was Wolfsburg’s first game since his close friend and team-mate, Junior Malanda, was killed in a car crash.


 Pep Guardiola has a formidable record 
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Having fallen behind as early as the fourth minute, Bayern simply pressed harder and higher up the pitch. This, however, merely exposed them to De Bruyne’s pace. Bayern’s two centre-halves, Dante and Jerome Boateng, trying to cover for the pushed-up full-backs, were hopelessly exposed. On an ice-cold night, Dante sometimes found himself facing four attackers. “We were brutally focused,” remarked the Wolfsburg manager, Dieter Hecking.

Bayern’s players were not inclined to linger after the game. What they did say was to the point: “They ripped us apart on the counter-attack,” said Arjen Robben. Manuel Neuer was even pithier: “it all went tits up.”

As he left with a rucksack slung over his back, De Bruyne made a comment that stands good for anyone planning to overcome one of Guardiola’s sides. “If you want to beat this team, you have to take risks.”

BAYERN MUNICH 1-2 MAINZ: March 2016: Tactic? Keeping the forwards at bay

It is a given that in every game Guardiola’s side will dominate possession. The story of their first home defeat of his final season at Bayern Munich suggests that if you defend your 18-yard line with passion and discipline, all that possession might not lead to anything.

The match statistics tell the story. Bayern Munich had 78 per cent of possession, forced 11 corners to nil but managed only six shots on target. The ball was almost permanently at their feet. They just didn’t do very much with it.

A heatmap of the game shows that although most of the possession took place in Mainz’s half, they usually managed to keep Bayern’s forward line of Robert Lewandowski, Arjen Robben and Franck Ribery away from their own 18-yard area or from outflanking their back four. The Mainz defensive pairing of Leon Balogun and Alexander Hack, threw themselves into challenges to keep Robert Lewandowski and Robben at bay. The shots Bayern aimed at Loris Karius’s goal, including Robben’s equaliser, tended to be from distance.

There were similarities with Hercules’s win over Barcelona. Guardiola was distracted by a bigger game – the Klassiker with Borussia Dortmund in three days’ time that would probably decide the destination of the title. Thomas Muller was rested. Like Esteban Vigo, Mainz’s manager, Martin Schmidt, told his players repeatedly in the build-up to the game that not only would they win they would score twice. Four minutes from time at the Allianz Arena, Jhon Cordoba broke away to settle the match and make the prediction reality.